In classic Team Obama style, Jones blames an orchestrated “campaign” of “lies and distortions to distract and divide.” Get ready for the coming media/left-wing martyrdom of Jones. Never mind his own apologies and weasel excuses for his radical views.

The mainstream media, which has ignored criticism and investigative analysis of Jones in the blogosphere/Internet since the spring (see, for example, here, here, here, here) repeats the lie that Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck targeted Jones only after the czar’s organization, Color of Change, initiated a boycott against Beck at the beginning of August:

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck repeatedly denounced Jones after a group the adviser co-founded, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck’s show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz also disseminated that distortion. Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard corrected the record last month for the clueless MSM. They persist in ignoring the truth:

Howard Kurtz on Sunday accused Fox News’s Glenn Beck of attacking White House “green czar” Van Jones in response to the advertiser boycott implemented by Color of Change, an advocacy group founded by Jones.

Such a conclusion seems to stem from all the time Beck spent on his program last week chronicling Jones’s activities as well as his background.

What Kurtz conveniently ignored in this installment of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” was that Beck did two reports on Jones prior to the start of Color of Change’s campaign to get companies to end their sponsorship of Beck.

Ironically, this came as Kurtz chided Beck for not sharing all the facts with his viewers…

Obama’s new green czar, Van Jones, this is a guy who is a self-avowed communist, and he is in the Obama administration. He says in his book that has been out now for about four months, “The Green Collar Economy,” subtitle: “How One Solution Can Fix Two Big Problems,” that the best way to fight global warming and urban poverty is by creating millions of green jobs.

This guy wasn’t a radical, and then was arrested. He spent six months in jail, came out a communist. Then he was a communist-anarchist radical. And then he decided — he found the eco-movement — and decided green is the new red. He then went on to become a green expert.

A percentage of these jobs, he says, should go to the disadvantaged and to the chronically unemployed. Well, why are they chronically unemployed? “The green economy should not just be about reclaiming thrown- away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities.”

And again on July 28:

BECK: All right. You know, what we’re uncovering here on this program is complex, and it is — it takes a lot of our day just to figure out how to explain it to you. And it’s complex by design. You know, it’s the vast left-wing conspiracy.

The Apollo Alliance combines environmental policy, the green movement, with labor and social justice. Why is that troubling? Maybe it’s the guy behind the curtain making it all happen. He’s a former black nationalist and self-professed communist.

Here is Phil Kerpen. He is the director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Phil, how are you, sir?

PHIL KERPEN, AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY: I’m good, Glenn. How are you?

BECK: Good. Tell me about — tell me a little bit about Apollo and these — I have ACORN and the Black Farmers and the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and AFL-CIO and SEIU. Why are these thee categories — how are they tied to Apollo?

KERPEN: Well, the Apollo Alliance is designed to bring together the elements of organized labor with the community organizers with the green groups, the environmental groups, and to access all of the big foundation money that’s been supportive of those causes in the past. So, it’s kind of — Van Jones, who you mentioned, the self-described communist who is now green jobs czar, he described the Apollo Alliance mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes that ties all these things together.

Instead of compensating for their willful failure to cover Jones’s radicalism by informing their readers about the full story, Obama water-carriers are helping the administration with its own campaign of distortion.

The story is not just about Beck or Fox or us racist conservatives martyring Van Jones.

In a victory for public disclosure and transparency over the Obama administration’s secrecy and evasion, the White House’s environmental jobs “czar” resigned on Saturday.

The Times continues:

Appointed as a special adviser for “green jobs” by President Obama, Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.”

And we should add an important fact to that paragraph, too:

Appointed as a special adviser for “green jobs” by President Obama, Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. The New York Times and other mainstream outlets did not want to touch the radical past and inflammatory statements of Mr. Jones reported on the Internet in the spring of 2009, when Mr. Jones’s appointment was first announced. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.”

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Update: Sen. Lamar Alexander on Fox News Sunday this morning: “He’s not the issue; the czars are the issue.”

GEORGE: Does the president believe that he is the victim of a smear campaign or does the president think that Jones actions and words merit resignation?

GIBBS: “Well what Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual. The president thanks Van Jones for his service in the first eight months helping to coordinate renewable energy jobs and lay the foundation for our future economic problem…The president accepted his resignation, but Van Jones as he said in his statement he was going to get in the way of the President.”

GEORGE: So the president doesn’t endorse in any way the things that Van Jones said before but the president doesn’t want him to go?